• Previous posts

  • Aging is for the weak, and everyone else
  • More short cuts
  • Smol Ketchups
  • What’s the opposite of green juice and deep breathing
  • Living through it all online
  • The Change
  • 18
  • Ok but ALSO:
  • Midlife POV
  • Influence and Dooce
  • Horse therapy
  • You can’t go home again
  • Obsolescence
  • Before and after
  • A cringe confession on friendship

Archives from 2002-2006

Oh, you guys. The relief of that last post, from the processing that always comes with writing to the way every kind comment and email feels like another support beam holding me upright. I cannot begin to thank you enough.

What a strange, unhappy week it’s been. Like many of you, I am sad and worried about what’s to come over the next four years. I read this phrase recently, You cannot hold back the tide, so you may as well work on building a better boat, and I have been carrying that, cupped in my hand like a bird. What’s done is done, and we must all find a way to live in this new reality. It’s like getting sober: the past is over, the future hasn’t happened yet. So what can I do today, to reinforce the vessel that will carry me through the waves? Maybe even make it strong enough to someday help others who may be getting pulled under?

I realize leftover Halloween candy is not necessarily a great long term building strategy for this endeavor, but I am for sure allowing myself a few shoddy materials this week.

In the non-chocolate-based self-care department, after years of eye-rolling the influx of adult coloring books that seem to have taken over the publishing industry I now find myself drawn — oh ho HO! — to them. I finally just printed a page online and have been studiously beavering away with my Crayola fine-tips, and I’m not sure if I like the activity or not. There’s something undeniably pleasant about the mindless concentration involved, but it also starts feeling like a task with no end in sight: like, am I ever going to be done with this thing?

I nearly trashed my page after realizing that completion would take hours and I didn’t much like the colors I’d used and honestly the laundry’s piling up while I sit here coloring like a preschooler, but I’d picked one of those chirpy motivational message designs. I imagined the relief of tossing it out … followed by the Et tu, universe? feeling of knowing what was lying in the recycling: a piece of paper printed with intricate swirls and patterns, and partially-colored letters that read “NEVER GIVE UP.”

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